Nocturnal Heartbeat
by Spawn Guy
Summary: The dark knight embarks on the ultimate side progect.
1. Fingers on the pulse

**Nocturnal heartbeat **

**Prolugue:Fingers on the pulse **

**With lyrics fromEversangs"Wake me up"**

This is a progect that I've been toying with for sometime. I know the sensible thing to do would be to wait until I finish my other stuff( _Harbingers_ kinda springs to mind ,dosent it?) but in the words of Slarteybartfast "Hang the sence of it." This is based on some of the particulary grim, posibley philosophical, and analitical states I've been in at one point or another.

This is not a song fic, I just heard this song in _Daredevil_ and thought it sounded cool. It's also not a journal, merley a colection of memories.

This story takes place in the same coexisteing universe as harbingers . If your looking for DC comunity it ocurs before JLA's "Tower of bable."

Gotham.

My city.

My strong hold.

My graveyard.

_How can you see into my eyes like open doors? _

I live in this city.

I live for this city.

I _am _this city.

I have become it's shadows, it's rooftops, it's parepets.

All for justice.

I made a promise to my parents, upon thier graves.

To avenge the evil that took thier lives.

_Leading you down into my core..._

That took my soul. _  
...where I've become so numb without a soul ,my spirit sleeping somewhere cold ..._

That took my heart.

_  
until you find it there and lead it back home._

That took them away from me.

_  
_After the cataclysim, the "Nomans land" I look around now

...and wonder how well I have kept that promise.

_Wake me up!  
Wake me up inside.  
I can't wake up!  
Wake me up inside.  
Save me!  
Call my name and save me from the dark. _

I do my best work in the dark.

But when Luthor rebulit this city , he took the shadows. The shadows I had so easily wraped my self in...and increased its coruption as much as giving back hope and home to the millions of innocents and vermin. He used Metropilis arcitecture of course, turned Gotham into someting it is not and never can be as long as my promise remains unfufiled.Through crystal and light, Luthor truly took Gothams life, constructing a mask better then Bruce Wayne could ever be. He was not unprepared to bloody his hands in the execution of this figerative murder. He tried to cut deep into it and me, all the while smirking more knowingly than a cheshire cat. And he did what he always does when he threatens and murders and destroys and conquers. He got away with it.

_  
Wake me up!  
Bid my blood to run...  
I can't wake up!  
...before I come undone...  
Save me!  
...save me from the nothing I've become!  
_

This is but one of many travisties, times when the mask of efectiveness is pushed to it's limits by the childish but semicorect logic of "It's not fair." A man with one of the most precious gifts of all (imortality, a chance to make every day count) uses it to sustain a legacy of attempted genocide. A peaceful, pascifist man (a rare dimond left out of a safe into the marring blackness of this world) becomes a vicsious murder, controlled by an archeic set of principles of a chaotic religious order. Where is the justice?

_Now that I know what I'm without  
you can't just leave me.  
Breathe into me and make me real.  
Bring me to life!  
_

I maintain contact with Oracle but under less...watchful meathods. She called it spying. She was right in everyway. But it was not done without reason. In this war a general is more endangered than a soildger. They can have a more powerful phycological effect, not tackeing into acount the damage done to leadership. Barbra no longer sees this as a game, not because she can no longer play ,but because the randomness yet calculated effectiveness with which injustice can happen is a sting she knows all to well. A bullet to the spine from a mad man can have same shatering impact on a life as two to an air born loving couple from a selfish one.Yet each outward spreading shard is diffrent.Yet similar. As Batgirl to Oracle, as Robin to Nightwing. Both identitys were an attempt to sieze that precious childness inocence in a world that was far from that. Both grew all to soon. A week ago we ruined a Bludhaven/Gotham drug ring, all three of us. Dick hung one of the younger fools from a twenty story drop, explainig clearly why he was more dangerous than Blockbuster. Barbra suggested 40 and prompted a more...interesting threat. Children. Yet now grown beyond their years. Tarnished and tinted by a darckness worse than evil. _M_y darckness.

_Wake me up!  
Wake me up inside.  
I can't wake up!  
Wake me up inside.  
Save me!  
Call my name and save me from the dark._

Some of the worst crimes are the self justified ones. Such as Venom andCarnage. The former a hiprocrit, unable to accept responcibility for self failings, rather blaming one individual who will always be in his eyes as the source of all that has gone wrong with his own internal universe, even duliding himself into beleiving he is just and going so far as to justify murder of guilty or inocent for vengance. The latter , the exact center of his ,and what he feels should be others, existence. Unable to atain this he seeks a way to become that star, standing out from humanity by loseing his own.This pair are typical of any other self excuseing criminals, beleiving that _they _are exempt from the rules, governmental and universal, that _they _can do anything to anyone simply because _they_ are who _they_ are. I fight ceaseless war against this kind of desease every second of my life. And God help me(if such an entity exists outside of Clark) I bring children down into the darkness with me.

_  
Wake me up!  
Bid my blood to run...  
I can't wake up!  
...before I come undone...  
Save me!  
...save me from the nothing I've become!  
_

I spoke with Clark recently. Leauger buisness. Could have been something more inportant. Crime is down in Metropolis recently. Considering Clark lives in the place that is actually impresive. "Crime isn't a disease Bruce. It's just the result of mankinds own inturnal natrual disasters. A tsunami of the soul is one way of looking at it." I hate it when he calls me Bruce. Insofar as "internal naterual disasters" he does indeed have a point. Diffrent sides of the underworld are formed upon those who come from wrong choices and troubled lives. One unwise action causes another and another, an all consuming ripple effect, like a whirlpool. with you at the center.That is the reason he gave me the ring, the reason I keep files on Diana, J,onn, Flash and the others. One day the power in those hands may lead to a soul destroying domino effect, turning an unacceptible view towards human life. In the other catagory however Clark could not be more wrong.

_Bring me to life!  
I've been living a lie! _

Crime,injustice: it is a disease. And every single man women and child on the planet is a possible victim or carrier.

_There's nothing inside!  
Bring me to life! _

The outcome of this war has been a long a difficult one, so far claiming one victim directly because of me. Jason. I intened to keep it that way.To fufil my promise._  
_  
_Frozen inside without your touch without your love darling .Only you are the life among the dead._

I belive I may have found a way already.__

All this time I can't believe I couldn't see  
kept in the dark but you were there in front of me! 

Detectives work through use of threads, untangleing them, tracing them to the source then unraveling them. And I am the worlds greatest detactve. These injustices all have a pattern to thier randomness, the way they strike the inocent, the wheles they set into motion. They could be pridicted, with further analysis and better understanding.

_  
I've been sleeping a thousand years it seems!  
Got to open my eyes to everything!  
Without a thought without a voice without a soul...  
Don't let me die here...  
...there must be something more  
...bring me to life.  
_

Clark was wrong. Crime is a desise. Evil is a disease. And the world is a patient,infected to stagering degres.  
_Wake me up!  
Wake me up inside.  
I can't wake up!  
Wake me up inside.  
Save me!  
Call my name and save me from the dark.  
Wake me up!  
Bid my blood to run...  
I can't wake up!  
...before I come undone...  
Save me!  
...save me from the nothing I've become!  
_

And I'm a doctor, with a new method and my finger on the pulse.

_  
Bring me to life!  
I've been living a lie... _

And a promise to keep.

_...There's nothing inside!  
Bring me to life! _

Anyone think that was deep? Not deep enough? To deep? TBC.__


	2. First incision

**1: First incision **

All I know is a door into the dark.

Seamus Heaney

The forge

No song intro this time. Spawns honour.

DC continuity is (starting) a few minutes into (and continuing a few days after) the last chapter of Tower of babble.

_The moon _

_8:30am US time _

_JLA watchtower_

"How well do you know him?"

Wally West's eyes shone inside the open eye holes of the Flash mask.

Holes that allowed a glimpse of the person underneath, confirmation that there was a soul under a skin that could resist air friction that could wipe out anything close to demilight speed level. A person inside.

Not like Bruce's.

Not like _Batman's_.

"Or I guess more to the point, how well does he know you?"

Superman continued to stare at the majestic waste land of the moon, whishing the two way blacked out glass blocked more than just the suns light.

The sun.

Food. Drink. Lover. Mother. Warmth. Comfort.

This entire incident made him seek refuge from the very source of his strength, literal and figurative.

_In brightest day, in blackest night…_

…_No evil shall escape my sight. _

_What of betrayal? _

The shield felt like an anchor. Dragging his spirit.

_How does Captain America handle this? Did he ever have to? _

_What have you done Bruce? What have you done? Was it because of the ring? _

Darksied had come so close, the parasite had tried to suck him dry God knew how many times, and there was no lack of telepaths and manipulators.

It had been a safe guard, that was all, a just in case. Had that been the cause of it all? What if he did go bad, what if Diana or Lantern or any of them did stop being the hero and became one of the countless legions of people who had no insight into how special their powers were?

Or rather did and though that made them more special than everybody else.

And any one with that view got taken down, _hard_, by Batman.

The league though…God the league. How could he not let them know?

How could he not think of the possibility that something like this would happen?

He probably had.

The files had probably been hidden deep within the confines of the cave, locked in a vault, if they had been on paper, or hidden in an encrypted file in the most hidden folder of the bat computers database. Batman would prepare for anything, every single possibility taken into account.

Which meant if someone found one he hadn't considered, they were extremely dangerous and the fallout near lethal.

Al Ghul had swept through them like a tidal wave, and when they washed up there had been almost nothing left but scars.

Al Ghul's scars. Bruce's methods.

"Well enough to know better than any of us how you'll vote?"

And knowing that this was someone who had taken what was essentially the most dangerous of secrets and turned them into a weapon, could they ever really turn their backs to him again? Let alone trust him?

Superman breathed in. Every time he closed his eyes he could feel the "Red Kryptonite", the agony and what went deeper. The betrayal.

He breathed out.

Opened the door.

Saw the empty table where Bruce should have been.

"Yes."

_Gotham city_

_11:00am _

"_Guilt by association. Every body in your sphere is getting the hairy eyeball." _

He didn't turn around. He didn't need to.

The same fire in her father's voice burned in hers. As it would in her eyes.

He just stood there, back to the screen, trying to continue modifying the batarang. He could still feel them though, tearing through the shreds of his cowl they weren't trying to burn away.

_Is this how the trash feel when I waste a glance on them? _

No. It wasn't.

They didn't know what he was, not really.

Man? Demon? God?

Hardly.

Oracle was different. He knew exactly what she was. And she had a good enough understanding of him to know how to attempt something with him where Nightwing and Robin would not.

Iron focus and resolve bent a fraction for almost the first time since Jason's death. He had to say something.

"If they're smart, they can turn that into a streng…"

"_Are you even listening to me?" _

The speakers almost shook. Then breathe, rattling through them. Making the emotion all the more raw.

"_What you've done has had such a ripple effect." _

Understatement. The league, the Titans, Young Justice…small but important parts of his promise, his war for Gotham taken near global.

You never realise how important something is until it's not there anymore.

He didn't say anything, just continued to modify the batarang.

His wings had almost been clipped. And what she said next ripped them apart.

"_If you meant for that to happen, admit it right now. If your not sorry about how all this went down, tell me so now. Say something."_

He couldn't ignore _that_, couldn't pretend to ignore it.

He turned to her, stared at her. He wanted to shout, to yell. How dare she say something like that, _how_ _dare_ she! Did she believe him to be that cold blooded? That heartless? Was that what they all thought? Diana? Tim? Dick? J'onn? Clark?

Almost everyone who saw him as he was believed that, saw the knife edged drive that went straight through anything in it's path. But none of them save a close few knew why. And they couldn't see where it put him. How it made him one of the few "mortal" heroes among near gods. They hadn't been there when Clark gave him the ring, had been associated with the murder of a small time Gotham extortionist, felt the doubt, because anybody, _anybody_, could loose that battle once out of ten times. They hadn't seen gaping abyss left in the graves of his most loved, stolen and violated. Hadn't seen the snake skin glint in Al Ghul's eye as their coffins dangled over the atrocity of the Lazarus pit. What would he have given for them? Really given? He'd given them vengeance and memory, and how long would that really last? Would he really have given them life…so he didn't have to do this anymore? What would they have done? What would any of them have done in the same position?

He wanted to say all this. But he didn't.

He cut the feed and went back to the damn batarang.

How did you do it father? How did you face the looks on everybody's faces when the lights went down and the body was rolled away to the morgue, bleeding a trail of shame? How could you face them when despite your best efforts, despite the fact it wasn't your fault, you still failed?

I am not naïve. I have not been since I was eight years old. I know you were not invincible. I'm not.

I've fought for your memory, tried to keep it alive without it been acknowledged.

It has become buried in the mantle of the bat, and no matter how far I go on, it's Batman that's still here and your not. My darkness has taken your light.

I believed this war (and it is a war, no matter what Clark says) was the only way, the only refuge for what was Bruce Wayne. That something could be achieved in the names of Thomas and Martha Wayne.

Bane, the quake and No mans land have put all that into question.

A detective is supposed to solve a case, bring the guilty to justice for the innocent, yet every one case I solve has another ten counterparts in sixty seconds.

Can even Clark help a world like that?

I'm beginning to see a way that I could.

He would not approve. _I _do not approve…yet recent events…

The whole idea, if I ever _do_ undertake it, is not to be taken lightly. It might be better to see it as a new form of medical aid. With Gotham, and myself, as the test subject for the first operation of it's kind.

Crime _is_ a disease. Almost a cancer.

It may be long past time to make the first incision…

Well…that's that for now. This is going to get more complex as I go, but then some people like that kind of thing. This, hopefully, heralds the completion of my work on Harbingers third chapter, when I will hopefully be able to truly present this fic as a worthy addition to Bat fiction everywhere. Until then review, you lazy bastards, or the next chapter of will contain a "Holy (insert object/person/ culture reference/ hetro or homo sexual/ popular teenage phrase of choice)Batman!"


End file.
